Sal M. Onella wrote:

"W. Watson" wrote in message
et...

I had an occasion to talk with C. Crane today, and got onto the topic of

an

FM Antenna for small digital radios. I have the two mentioned in the

Subject

line. The agent menioned using just a sinple 5' wire for this purpose.

I've not had good luck getting FM reception with RS, and have tried a

simple

dipole without much luck. I live in the Sierra Foothills at 2700', and the
trouble is with stations in the Sacramento area (60 mi) and Chico (75 mi).
It occurred to me the simple 5' single wire antenna provided with Pogo has
been very effective in improving FM reception, so I put it on RS.

Practially

no difference with or without it. What's up with that?

Note that RS looks like shark fin, and has a built in FM and AM antenna,

and

a jack to plug in an external FM antenna. The RS is plugged into a USB

port

and it is very much like Tivo but for radio.


FM signals have a wavelength around 3 meters, so a quarter wave whip antenna
would be in the range of 75 cm long. Not fitting that into the fin, are we?
A built-in is a bad-deal compromise for FM.

How was your "simple dipole" connected to the RS? With two wires, perhaps
one to the FM antenna terminal and the other to common on the radio? You
don't say whether the jack was a coaxial jack or just a single-conductor pin
jack.

Not every antenna needs to be connected with two wires to work, but it's
true for the ones that work the best on FM broadcast. They're either coax
or twinlead -- two conductors either way. If EXT FM ANT is just a pin jack,
I'd get to the common electrically by soldering a wire to the negative
battery terminal and running it out of the case to connect to one of the
antenna leads. A cap in that lead will isolate any DC path off the antenna
jack.

A folded dipole is common antenna for FM -- easy to build, easy to hang on
the wall or tape on a stick for elevating outside a window. First ones I
ever saw were on my high school A/V Dept televisions. Cut for Channel 13,
the local educational station, and taped to a stick. Worked.


As far as I can tell, the "simple" dipole is a single strand of wire wrapped
in plastic. It's supplied by the Pogo mfger. In the shark it plugs into a
single antenna socket for an external. For the Pogo it plugs into what is
called the phones socket. The question remains. Why does this simple wire
work reasonably well in one radio device but not the other? The connection
looks snug in both cases.

See http://www.griffintechnology.com/products/radioshark2/ and
http://www.ccrane.com/radios/am-fm-radios/pogo-radio-yourway-lx/index.aspx.
I'm not sure the shark page is functioning properly. I don't see a picture
at the top, which I've seen before. The antenna socket is near the USB wire
on the vertical section of the fin. A picture of the antenna wire is buried
in the manual for Pogo.


Wayne T. Watson (Watson Adventures, Prop., Nevada City, CA)
(121.015 Deg. W, 39.262 Deg. N) GMT-8 hr std. time)
Obz Site: 39° 15' 7" N, 121° 2' 32" W, 2700 feet

"It is better to be “approximately right” rather than
“exactly wrong." -- John Tukey, Statistican
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